W.H. pushes back hard at Suskind

The White House launched an aggressive response to a forthcoming book that chronicles internal dissent and second-guessing of President Barack Obama by his own staff and presents Obama as a conflicted, sometimes wavering leader.

Administration officials assert that “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President” by Ron Suskind is infested with errors, both big (what they characterize as misquotations and distorted narratives) and small (several names, a birthdate, a publication date, an employer, an unemployment rate, etc.) and gives a distorted and inaccurate picture of the White House under Obama.

Story Continued Below

But the book’s highly publicized launch was more bad news for a White House reeling this week from declining poll numbers and a call from a prominent Democrat — former Clinton aide James Carville — for Obama to shake up his staff because “It’s not going to work with the same team, the same strategy, and the same excuses.”

And this wound was self-inflicted. Suskind received extensive cooperation from high levels of the administration — including a 50-minute Oval Office interview with the president — in reporting the book, which will be published Tuesday by Harper Collins but was obtained by POLITICO and several other news organizations.

Suskind also interviewed Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and a host of current and former Obama aides. Suskind writes in a “Sources” section: “746 hours of interviews were conducted with more than 200 individuals.”

Some of those aides are quoted as being highly critical of either the president or the White House.

Former White House economic adviser Larry Summers, according to Suskind, told then-OMB director Peter Orszag that as far as economic policy, “There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes.’”

Former communications director Anita Dunn is described by Suskind as feeling she worked in an overwhelmingly male environment at the White House

“[T]his place would be in court for a hostile workplace … Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women,” Suskind quotes her as saying.

Both Summers and Dunn disputed the quotations attributed to them.

Dunn told POLITICO: “This is not what I told the author, this is not what I believe and anyone who knows me and my history of supporting this president as a candidate and in office knows this isn’t true” — a flat denial that will put pressure on Suskind to publicly document what she told him.